Since the 2024-2025 school year, KatyISD students have been issued personal chromebooks. Every student now has their own district issued chromebook to do school work on. But that was last year, how has everyone adjusted?

So far students have done most of their assignments on Canvas and been writing most essays on Google documents. Many assignments that would have been on paper have gone online to other applications. These include; Canva, Google documents, Google slides, and Canvas. These applications aren’t new, however students are now using them everyday all day for school.

The everyday use of chromebooks hasn’t just affected the students and teachers. Librarians now have more technology to help with.

“It’s affected the library since the beginning.” Says librarian Andrea Mion. “It comes in seasons; password changes, software updates, 10-20 kids come in asking for help. It can be disruptive, but we can still do check-out.”

Due to the nature of the online world, many students have found innovative ways to get entertainment during class rather than do their work. Thankfully, the extension GoGuardian has helped teachers regulate this behavior by blocking students from doing things other than opening very few websites. Teachers can also watch what students are doing on their chromebooks during class using this extension.

However, technology doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes chromebooks die during the school day, certain websites are banned, things take too long to load, and assignments won’t submit correctly. While there are ways to fix these problems, sometimes it takes a long time or teachers will have to change what they’re doing that day due to a website refusing to work during a certain class period or for the entire day.

A year into this new era of online assignments and testing, schooling will never be the same. Going into the future, students and teachers will have to get used to this new world and adapt to it.